Flow and Resistance

Our attempts to subvert the first law of thermodynamics

Stock Photo Florian Klauer

How to start? The very act of putting this post together seems to place these opposites - flow and resistance - squarely in my way. I am not a methodical researcher and while I do like a spreadsheet occasionally to work out a budget this formal rigidity is not my home turf. I prefer the flow of writing what is in my mind and editing along the way but starting is always the biggest hurdle - the ‘resistance’.

Context, perhaps, would be a useful beginning. An introduction - tell ‘em what you’re going to say, say it, then tell ‘em what you’ve told ‘em: a teacher training motto I learned many years ago which also served as an essay structure formula that as you may have guessed I didn’t take much notice of.

Context, then. You will forgive me if a take a rather circuitous route to the heart of this missive but I’ve been following the energy debate for some time now and moved through the excitement phase of new developments that promise clean, cheap power through to the plateau of incremental change and on to the disillusionment of - well, that is what has sparked this latest offering (pardon the pun…) and constitutes the bulk of what follows.

Cards on the table, I have been increasingly convinced by the ‘Degrowth’ movement’s take on the future viability of a life on this planet and followed the likes of Jason Hickel who has shown how such a path can foster social equality as well as a reduction in overall consumption.

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But it was a recent interview on Planet Critical with Jean-Baptiste Fressoz that struck home and precipitated the disillusionment that had been brewing.

It was around his research on the history of energy and energy use and his conclusion that the ‘energy transition’ (the whirlwind of wind turbines and PV panels that are being inexorably rolled out) is not a transition at all.

It turns out that this phrase, ‘energy transition’, was a technical term used in the early days of atomic physic. It was then picked up by a scientist to use in a slightly wider context and then seized on by no less a man than Jimmy Carter to explain convincingly but quite erroneously how nuclear power would be the energy of the future and replace fossil fuels. In fact, as wood was followed by coal and coal by oil and oil by nuclear none of the ‘replaced’ forms of energy suffered any reduction in use. Quite the opposite. More timber was used to make pit props for coal mines than was previously burned. More coal was used than was burned previously to make the steel that was needed to build drilling platforms that produced oil - not to mention the increased use of steel girders to build the taller buildings that also became the fashionable totem of this new oil-rich society and the ships to move the oil and myriad goods across the globe. Nuclear is still relatively niche as it has proved expensive to build and expensive to decommission as well as suffering an adverse press so, apart from places like France, it has only contributed a few percent of the energy needs in most western countries.

And now, in our hour of need, along comes clean, green energy, riding to the rescue to rid us of these polluting forms of energy that we have been so attached to but now realise, very late in the day, we should be abandoning. But very far from being a replacement these new forms of energy are merely adding to the expanding production of oil and gas. We are using more energy than ever. Not only that, the clean, green machine like all production is heavy on materials and heavy on the use of conventional energy sources to make this dream come true and the volume of materials required is huge and will itself cause more pollution and the destruction of land with its wildlife and rivers to achieve its goal. Perhaps needing more materials than there are available.

The energy story above illustrates how the search for and acquisition of evermore energy-dense sources is sold to us as an unalloyed benefit. More power equals a better life. We can make more things, stop having to worry about putting the kettle on or the heating or the AC. Wouldn’t endless cheap clean power be such a boon! The ‘clean energy’ story, by the way, is a sop to our concerns about fossil fuel emissions and does not represent a change of course. While in principle it does reduce emissions overall the problems described above make it unlikely that it can be anything more than a temporary contributor to power creation - and it only contributes and doesn’t overall replace. It is also something of red flag about our reliance on technology as our climate saviour but we will come to that .

There is something of a message in this technology dream which so often has nightmarish outcomes. The sons of the Enlightenment see this as a endless challenge, to find just the right materials, just the right combinations, just the right configuration to build the ultimate machine. It is Douglas Adams’ darkly comical creation of Deep Thought and I know that I have alluded to this before but I can’t help returning as it seems so wonderfully to capture the futility of these technological strivings and the awe-inspiring complexity and abundance of our planet.

[If you’re struggling to remember or have still not been exposed to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy then, in brief, galactic beings wanted to know the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything”. To that end they built the super computer, Deep Thought, asked it the question and waited for Aeons for the answer: 42. Unable to understand the answer they built another super computer and called it ‘Earth’….]

The message I was thinking of is: technology has always promised more than it delivers: that every innovation will make our lives easier, give us more leisure time, take the drudgery out of life. Somehow, though, it never works out that way.

As an expression of the Enlightenment technical innovation has always come with the promise of Utopia. The steam engine, the light bulb, the telephone, the vacuum cleaner, the washing machine, credit cards, the mobile phone, manufacturing robots - they have all come with the promise of more time for leisure, etc. This will make your life easier and more carefree. The shiny future that beckons us forward to finally make good on that promise.

The falsehood of this promise is of course obvious but the more interesting part is how we buy in to the dream time after time. Much like the ‘energy transition’ these innovations don’t free us up but enslave us further. I should only have to mention emails to anyone who works to make this point but I am, while only a handful of years retired, hopelessly out of date and I’m sure that being on top of communications on social platforms, not to mention texts, WhatsApp messages and the like is the tyranny of most working people. For a really good exposition of the way in which technology affects our lives I recommend Brett Scott’s post:

Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster

The point is that we have bought into the idea that life should be easier and freer and as the world becomes ever more frenetic this becomes a greater and greater need. In fact we dream of floating serenely on a sea of consciousness, untethered from this worldly fractiousness, We dream of rising above this spinning top of a life by practising mindfulness, meditation, yoga, drumming or the time-honoured practice of taking mind-altering substances. It’s not that these things are bad or useless but they were largely intended to support the transition of stable minds to a higher plane rather than rescue frazzled minds to help them achieve some temporary stability.

The desire for a care-free life is an illusion. Not only is it an illusion it isn’t even something that would benefit you if you had it. Not convinced? Read on.

Let us consider ‘flow’ state - that slightly out-of-body experience we occasionally get when something we do stops being an effort and we are ‘in the zone’. Everything happens as it should and we are smashing it but it’s almost as if we are watching ourselves be this fluidly skilful person. If you have experienced this you will know how wonderful it is. The route to a flow state though is anything but fluid. In my teacher training I learned about the Unconscious/Incompetence model which is a way of describing the process of becoming good at some skill. There are four stages:

1. Unconscious Incompetence ->

2. Conscious Incompetence ->

3. Conscious Competence ->

4. Unconscious Competence

You may know this but if you don’t:

No.1 is when you don’t even know you can’t do something. No.2 is when you try out the skill (perhaps a sport or a game or a mental or manual skill) and find you’re not much good at it. No.3 is when after a certain amount of practice you become quite good as you become more familiar with the steps and run through them as you practice. No.4 is when those steps become second nature. You don’t have to think about them and you can just concentrate on refining your technique. The flow state is perhaps the fifth step where everything just works without any effort at all.

The thing is we can’t be for ever in a flow state. We appreciate it because it is relatively rare and because when it does occur it is almost always because we have put in the blood, sweat and tears to have a chance of experiencing it. We need challenge and a certain amount of failure both to learn and enjoy the journey of improvement. This is the Resistance. And this is not just true in the arena of skills.

We need darkness to appreciate the light; rainy days to appreciate the sunshine; black and white to appreciate colour; cold to appreciate heat; confrontation to appreciate cooperation and a whole host of other things - in fact just about everything we experience has an opposite and there is a very good argument that nothing can exist without its opposite. That means that to achieve flow we also need resistance.

The resistance I feel at the start of writing something. Where to start, how will it be taken by readers, am I even writing about the ‘right’ thing? The resistance to changing an established practice. What would a new way look like, will others accept it, will it really be better and who for?

Artists stories abound of the anxiety of getting their creation right, reaching a point where it seems hopeless and then as they push on it (usually) comes together. Most accept that this is just a stage of the process and perhaps one that is necessary to the realisation of the piece.

Conversely, fast tracking, nepotism and other ways of side-stepping the grind of learning the basics often lead to distrust and the reality that those who have leap-frogged the learning process rarely make great managers.

Yet, the technology message is that we can side-step resistance, leave it behind and create an everlasting flow. It seeks to ignore the Newtonian law of equal and opposite forces and the first law of thermodynamics that energy cannot be created or destroyed. In its grubby profiteering roots it knows that there is a price to pay for everything but that this price can be paid by others while it rakes in the cash for its crop of attractive blooms whose beguiling scent draws us further into the fantasy garden. It knows this but still peddles the nonsensical dream

There isn’t a country on earth that doesn’t have a set of laws proscribing some behaviours that are deemed unacceptable and enforcing other behaviours that are deemed desirable. In other words, we have to put things in the way of people doing or not doing what they would like to direct them to live in more socially acceptable ways. We might call them pro-social resistance mechanisms. Yet, when it comes to technology it seems we do our best to put aside such pro-social resistance mechanisms and swallow the cool aid of progress that tech companies pour liberally into our cups.

Coming back to the energy realm, the real prize that is always just about to be cracked is nuclear fusion. Should this become a reality then unlimited energy might just be a thing. But you have to ask: could we handle unlimited energy? What would that look like? To answer that you have only to look at what we have used energy for to date.

There is little dispute that the discovery of fossil-based fuels which have an energy density many times greater than wood has led to the near destruction of the world on which we now live so precariously. It has fuelled the growth of cities, food, extraction and a global population that grew 400% in a century. Arguably it has fuelled the dreams of wealth which for some have become so obscenely realised but this may just be a tight correlation. It has certainly fuelled wars both as a reason for war and through the destructive power of modern weaponry which is founded on the availability of such energy sources. Digital currencies and AI are just the latest examples of our our energy-hungry mindset. The more power we have at our disposal the more we use irrespective of the negative consequences in our quest for eternal growth.

Do we really want to remove more barriers to accommodate the beast and allow it to rampage over what is left of the planet? We are hell-bent on acquiring knowledge but deaf to the wisdom that should be the product of this learning, selecting instead the information that serves our narrow purpose only and presuming a mastery of our world that is not only arrogant but completely illusory.

Flow and resistance, like all pairs of opposites, are necessary to each other. They complete each other. They are the balance of the flow of energy that cannot be created or destroyed. With each new discovery of energy sources we are unleashing the latent energy of our planet and our solar system and this release will induce an equal and opposite reaction. We can no longer afford to ignore that reaction.

We may be in the process of learning this lesson and should we survive the process we might gain the wisdom to understand our shortcomings as stewards of the planet and put in the required ‘resistance’ that would safeguard our future and provide sufficient flow to make life enjoyable.

We might.